scrape_r_rational/data/cache/3uu435.md

[RT][FF] Chapter 22 of Lighting Up the Dark, a rational Naruto fanfic

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• u/Kodix:

  I liked how subtly manipulative Kabuto was with Naruto. A compliment here, a bluff there, and he's sold on the whole concept. Seems likely he won't even double check with the proctors that Kabuto actually *is* a jonin - some of them could be *spies*, after all.
  
  Also, Hinata's technique is pretty neat. I like how you asked yourself what secondary powers are required for canon Hyuuga capabilities, and then went on trying to abuse those in a novel way. Feels internally consistent, not asspull-ish, and interesting.
  

• u/Jiro_T:

  "If I wanted to deceive you about X, why would I do Y?" is self-defeating (and a version of Goodhart's Law), because as long as Y is an indicator of not-X, Y becomes useful as part of a deception about X and therefore is no longer useful as an indicator of not-X.
  
  Also, the characters don't know they're in a rational fic (they know *they* are rational, but not that everyone else is), so the proper answer to "would I be stupid enough to do Y if I wanted X" could very well be "yes, lots of people are stupid that way.  It's called cognitive bias, or just making mistakes."  Being unprepared for irrational behavior on the part of others is a mark of a Straw Vulcan.
  

  • u/Transfuturist:

    > "If I wanted to deceive you about X, why would I do Y?" is self-defeating (and a version of Goodhart's Law), because as long as Y is an indicator of not-X, Y becomes useful as part of a deception about X and therefore is no longer useful as an indicator of not-X.
    
    Not if the cost of Y given X is greater than the benefit gained from the deception. Not to mention that deception itself involves detectable patterns of behavior.
    

    • u/PeridexisErrant:

      Which relies on knowing the value of a deception, and actually makes you *more* vulnerable at high stakes.
      

• u/Transfuturist:

  Anko was great, especially when Tenten piped up. Gaara is horrifying even when not in scene. The RNG joke was beautiful.
  
  >"Why don't we forget Naruto and talk team strategy?"
  
  >Neji looked insulted.
  
  >"Do whatever you want, Haruno, as long as you stay out of my way."
  
  Burn! Now let that burn grow into the conflagration of your downfall!
  
  ...
  
  Is every 2v2 match going to devolve into 2x1v1?
  
  >To an outsider, the Gentle Fist Style looked incongruously like an attempt to slap your opponent
  
  *Please* tell me that Juuken is actually a chakra-enhanced slapfight.
  

  • u/NotAHeroYet:

    I doubt it. Every match with similar-but-not-adative styles is, but a melee-ranged team might work well together, or other teams of similar skill. It really depends on if you're better off working as a pair or individual. In this case, sakura was better fighting Ino, and hinata would have been best off taking ino out herself, followed by taking out neji.
    

• u/Jiro_T:

  Also, characters in fics seem to have never heard of epistemic learned helplessness, even though real human beings act that way all the time.  The proper response to someone trying to talk you out of an exam fight is to say "In a battle is a poor time to evaluate a proposition, where the proposition is likely to be based on motivated reasoning, where there is little time to evaluate it in, where I can't have peers review it, and where even giving the proposition a fair hearing has costs.  So I don't see any point in bothering to evaluate it."  Try as hard as you can to win the fight, and if it turns out in hindsight that the argument for giving up made sense, you just got unlucky.  Hinata should have just ignored Neji, not bothered to respond or think about what he said.
  
  (Of course, it's a lot more dramatic when characters throw propositions at each other in fights, which is why fiction does it.)
  

  • u/Transfuturist:

    > "In a battle is a poor time to evaluate a proposition, where the proposition is likely to be based on motivated reasoning, where there is little time to evaluate it in, where I can't have peers review it, and where even giving the proposition a fair hearing has costs. So I don't see any point in bothering to evaluate it."
    
    Points for missing the fact that this is completely different from how someone who's being psyched out in a fight actually thinks and feels. You have to *train* this nonreaction. You have to *precommit* to it.
    

    • u/Jiro_T:

      I wouldn't point this out if this wasn't a rational fic.  But since it is a rational fic, characters should ideally act in ways that characters in other sorts of fic might not usually act.
      
      Besides, they're ninjas.  They train lots of things that people don't normally do.
      
      (And there are also plenty of characters who should naturally act that way anyway.  "stubbornness" and such are just terms describing how humans precommit.)
      

      • u/Transfuturist:

        There are plenty of irrational characters in HPMOR. Rationalist fiction shows the most effective players as having the most effective practices.
        
        As for stubbornness, Sasuke is stubborn. Hinata is not.
        

• u/None:

  Oh, the marvels of random events!
  
  Perfectly executed, in my opinion. I wonder how you will go around the caged bird seal thing, it's a pretty stupid device however you look at it. And I can't imagine main branch members not abusing it.
  

  • u/Transfuturist:

    It would be pretty cool if the Caged Bird was given to all Hyuuga, and all Hyuuga were able to activate it (It also makes more sense because the main branch in canon is unsealed, even though the goddamn *point* of the seal is to protect the bloodline). They'd indoctrinate their children into their sacrifice for the clan, to protect the bloodline as it protects their own. The kind of indoctrination that [Free](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3nwfh6/biweekly_challenge_precommitment/cvuftj9) demonstrates.
    
    This commitment of their lives to the clan would naturally affect their values, kind of like how the Hyuuga behave in canon but even more alien, and the main/branch distinction wouldn't even come up. Just a sociopathic system producing a unified front. The ingroup is the clan, the outgroup is *everyone else.*
    
    >"You judged me for a lesser being, rather than a Hyuuga. Your mistake."
    

    • u/None:

      Exactly! Canon CBS is an unsustainable proposition, it even baffles me /u/Valorien chose to adopt it. A smart enemy would just go for the main branch, just like Lightning did in canon, only they wouldn't stop the first time, and try again until they got the byakugan.
      
      Like you said, to be useful the CBS should work like a cyanide pill, if they get you kill yourself for the good of the clan. Strange enough Uchiha didn't adopt a similar method. Stranger too there is no concocted Uchiha family in any other ninja country (unless you take into account Naruto Gaiden, which I don't).
      

      • u/Velorien:

        > It would be pretty cool if the Caged Bird was given to all Hyuuga, and all Hyuuga were able to activate it
        
        The problem with this is if someone found a way to hack it (not theoretically impossible - for example, Orochimaru stops Naruto's seal from feeding Naruto Nine-Tails chakra by forcing his own seal on top of it, and that's a crude mid-combat hack), it would doom the entire clan, rather than, at worst, the branch family.
        
        >A smart enemy would just go for the main branch, just like Lightning did in canon
        
        On the other hand, the main family is stronger and better-guarded. No one in the Narutoverse is *immune* to being kidnapped for their clan secrets. The CBS at least helps a little by allowing the Hyūga to keep the branch family weaker than the main one without turning them into a liability.
        
        > only they wouldn't stop the first time, and try again until they got the byakugan.
        
        You don't get infinite retries when attacking someone. Get caught once and it's a diplomatic incident. Get caught repeatedly and it's a full-on war.
        
        >Stranger too there is no concocted Uchiha family in any other ninja country
        
        How do you envision this? Getting the Sharingan doesn't enable you to breed new Uchiha, and recreating the Uchiha genes using science is beyond even Orochimaru.
        
        I suppose there *is* such a thing as kidnapping and forced breeding, but I suspect that would have been a bit too dark for a shōnen anime series. Also, by the time you kidnap enough Uchiha to make that practical and worthwhile, they will find out who you are and Leaf will annihilate you (with the full blessing of every village that doesn't want anyone getting ideas about *their* Bloodline Limits).
        

        • u/None:

          > The problem with this is if someone found a way to hack it, it would doom the entire clan, rather than, at worst, the branch family.
          
          I've come up with a workaround to a problem like this that took me literally two seconds. It follows, you have thought of something too, haven't you?
          
          >You don't get infinite retries when attacking someone. Get caught once and it's a diplomatic incident. Get caught repeatedly and it's a full-on war.
          
          > Also, by the time you kidnap enough Uchiha to make that practical and worthwhile, they will find out who you are and Leaf will annihilate you
          
          Well yes, unless you do so during one of the *three* full-on wars that have already happened.
          
          >On the other hand, the main family is stronger and better-guarded. The CBS at least helps a little by allowing the Hyūga to keep the branch family weaker than the main one without turning them into a liability.
          
          -Say brother, how would you like for you and all your descendants to be bound to permanent service/probable abuse to me and my descendants, on pain of death?
          
          -Why yes brother, it seems like a wonderful and perfectly reasonable idea! Here, paint my forehead first.
          
          Legit.
          

          • u/Velorien:

            > I've come up with a workaround to a problem like this that took me literally two seconds. It follows, you have thought of something too, haven't you?
            
            We could come up with a long series of workarounds and counter-workarounds if we wanted to. In the end, any ninja with an iota of caution will not strap a bomb to someone's forehead, no matter how confident they are in their control of that bomb, unless that person is on some level expendable.
            
            > Well yes, unless you do so during one of the three full-on wars that have already happened.
            
            Those wars ended, though. I can't see any peace treaty which would involve Leaf (or any of the other sides in the conflict) permitting another village to continue an Uchiha breeding programme.
            
            > Say brother, how would you like for you and all your descendants to be bound to permanent service/probable abuse to me and my descendants, on pain of death?
            
            We don't know how the Hyūga came to have a branch family with a Caged Bird Seal, but it's not difficult to come up with a plausible scenario from the clan's distant past. "For your attempt to usurp the clan leadership, you and your followers must die - but we will permit you to live on and serve us as a branch family if you take this seal which guarantees you and your descendants can never rebel against us again."
            

            • u/None:

              > We could come up with a long series of workarounds and counter-workarounds if we wanted to. In the end, any ninja with an iota of caution will not strap a bomb to someone's forehead, no matter how confident they are in their control of that bomb, unless that person is on some level expendable.
              
              Precisely. The point here is, everyone is expendable as long as the clan power stays home.
              
              >Those wars ended, though. I can't see any peace treaty which would involve Leaf (or any of the other sides in the conflict) permitting another village to continue an Uchiha breeding programme.
              
              I can. Peace requires compromises.
              
              >For your attempt to usurp the clan leadership, you and your followers must die - but we will permit you to live on and serve us as a branch family if you take this seal which guarantees you and your descendants can never rebel against us again.
              
              I have mixed feeling about that. Deserved death sentence or endless slavery and abuse?
              

              • u/NotAHeroYet:

                endless slavery that still contains the choice of death at any point. the abuse probably wasn't there, originally- that was probably a gradual addition.
                
                Originally, it was nothing more than a personal kill-switch. the passing onto descendants was from the fact that grudges came from binding parents, no matter how justified you were- or at least, the main family thought so. if you're going to have a grudge, have a kill-switch ready.
                

                • u/Velorien:

                  It might even not have been endless slavery at the beginning. After all, the first generation would have included friends and immediate relatives of what became the main family. That might have been part of the rationale for sparing dangerous rebels in a generally harsh and merciless shinobi world (though doubtless pragmatism would also a significant factor for a clan with high power but low numbers). It's possible that the oppression built up over generations as the gulf between the two families gradually widened.
                  

      • u/Valorien:

        A tiny spelling error led me to your post.  ;)
        

• u/Zephyr1011:

  I'm extremely unclear in what happened in Sakura and Ino's fight. What did Sakura do that anyone else couldn't do against Ino? Is this the result of a great deal of preparation to fight Ino specifically?
  

  • u/Kodix:

    No, that's a canon thing - something like that happened there, too. Sakura has a multiple personality disorder of a kind, where she has an Inner Sakura personality and an outer (normal) Sakura. This apparently lets her somewhat-resist the Yamanaka mind-body jutsu. 
    
    More info [here](http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Inner_Sakura#Inner_Sakura).
    

• u/Cariyaga:

  Hahaha, that was brilliant. I loved the Persona reference in Sakura's fight. I really do need to get around to finishing Persona 4...
  

• u/None:

  You seem to have greatly improved in effectively describing ninja combat! It seemed clunky in the forest of death, but it's smoothed out noticeably. Congratulations! That can't have been easy.
  

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